BRIGG SUGAR FACTORY ENJOYED SWEET SUCCESS

Although Brigg Sugar Factory closed in the early 1990s, there are still many people living in the town today who used to work there.
It was a major employer - full-time and part-time - with extra workers taken on temporarily for the annual beet processing campaign.
We are coming up to the 90th anniversary of the factory opening.
The Hull Times weekly newspaper, which covered this area, reported the milestone in its edition on October 6, 1928.
There must have been plenty of news about; this story only made page 13!
Surprisingly, the entire factory did not take long to construct.
The Hull Times reported  "site plans" for the facility on land at Scawby Brook in March 1928.
Despite this being a rather depressed period economically, the new factory thrived in its early years.
In August 1933, The Times reported increased beet growing on Lincolnshire farms, the crops being earmarked for processing at the Brigg and Bardney factories, the latter being near Lincoln and opening slightly ahead of ours.
Some British Sugar employees affected by the closure of the Brigg factory in the 1990s, transferred to jobs at Bardney, which remained open.
Today there are only four sugar factories in England, the nearest to us being at Newark, in Nottinghamshire.
During the heady days when it employed hundreds of people, the Brigg factory had a link to the national railway network and even its own locomotive to shunt the transfer sidings.
However, most of the beet was delivered from farms by lorries and tractor-hauled trailers.
The factory's impressive and wide entry road off the B1206 Scawby Brook is still in place today.
Once a beet lorry or trailer arrived at the Brigg factory, a sample was taken at random from the load to test for sugar content.
The beet was then unloaded, washed out with a water jet and prepared for slicing into V-shaped sections called cossettes.
Next came diffusion, purification, evaporation, boiling and rotation in centrifuges to appear at gleaming white sugar crystals, to be dried, cooled and graded for packaging.
In 1981 the firm had a permanent workforce of 340, rising to 440 during the processing campaign, lasting for 120 days.
Today, part of the very extensive former  factory site is now used by power generation companies, with biomass material arriving to be processed.
For decades the sugar factory had its own sportsground and social club, adjoining  Ancholme Leisure Centre (built in the 1970s).
The former factory club building was boarded up many years ago, and the sportsground beyond is also unused, the grass still being cut periodically.